On Rules

Photo by Alexander Kluge
image courtesy of unsplash.com

The first and most helpful thing I realized about writing is that there are no rules.  Anything goes.

So much time is spend during one’s formal education, or at least during mine, memorizing rules for composition, particularly essay and short-answer composition, that when it comes to creative writing one can easily find one’s self at a loss of how to begin.

But the most important thing to realize is that when it comes to creative writing it is impossible to do wrong.  You can do anything you want with words, absolutely anything; learn them, create them, try to destroy them (it’s difficult), shape them in your image, build castles, airships, wars and peace treaties, picnics and predicaments with them.  You can invent an entirely new system of symbolic logic derived from the order in which frogs jump into a pond when you approach, or you can sit and copy word for word the entirety of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from a paperback copy into a spiral bound notebook.  No one’s going to stop you.  Surprisingly few people will even try.  The only thing that matters is that you write something down.

Never, never worry that what you’re writing isn’t good enough or smart enough or original enough.  There are no standards, no one is watching, no one is judging what you’re doing.  You can ask people to read your stuff, if you like it enough to want to share it, but that’s later on.  For now, ignore everything you think you know about writing and just start putting down words.  See where it takes you.

Over time, I think, most people tend towards consistently writing about certain things, or at least writing what they write in certain ways.  Does this reflect something about them as people, or as artists?  Maybe, but I suspect it reflects something about some people and doesn’t on others.  But sooner or later rules about what’s easy to write, or what’s interesting, or what’s rewarding, start to suggest themselves all on their own.

Ignore this, unless it’s useful to you.  Don’t let any simulacra into your sandbox, it’s your sandbox, you get to do what you want.  Always, always remember that there are no rules.

But what if I want to get published one day?

Well of course.  And the worst part is probably that most of the important rules are secret, or very hard to find out, and even harder to follow.

Surely there are plenty of rules involved in making that happen.  But those are a far way up in the air and a long way off.  For now I’ll confine myself to worrying just about writing effectively, rather than writing with any other goal in mind, and writing just one particular kind of thing.

I’m no poet.  I like stories.  I enjoy reading some poetry, but in the end some, or most, is either baffling or sterile.  I understand with my brain that poems do things that stories can’t do, or maybe that they do those things more efficiently, that is, using fewer words.  It’s probably a matter of exposure; I’ve read many, many times more stories than I have poems, maybe because for most of my life more stories were easily available to me.

But for better or for worse, I like writing best of almost all things worth doing, and of all kinds of writing I like storytelling.  I haven’t written as much as a more dedicated person might have by this point in my life, and I’ve never published anything (unless blogs count -- the electronic world has become so fluid in the last ten years that I’m honestly not sure at this point what publishing even really means).

So, are there rules for storytelling?

Again, I have to insist that there are no rules in writing.  But once we start considering telling a story, and what’s worse trying to tell that story well, shadows and suggestions of conduct and convention start to impose themselves.  Some are useful, some are not.

Surely there are informal rules about writing and reading that everybody who reads or writes understands reasonably well, whether they realize they understand them or not.

The writer, for instance, depends on knowing a certain number of words in common with the reader in order to be understood.  The reader, at least usually, depends on the writer to make clear what it is they’re trying to get across (or, if they’re trying to convey something that is unclear, to at least convey their chaos in a way that it can be aware of it as such).  Both parties want some meaning in the written words to be conveyed from one to the other, and both parties (usually) want the time they invest in the piece to be recompensed by that meaning, or something like it.

All that’s a lot of noise.  Being an English speaker, when I pick up a book written in English, I expect to be able to understand what the person is writing about, and maybe even why they thought the book was worth writing in the first place.

But when it comes to creative writing, and for me writing fiction in particular, what are the rules, if any?  What is storytelling, why do people engage in it, and what separates good stories from bad?

In some ways these questions are what this blog has been about.  Exploring what I consider to be the key rules about telling stories, and trying to figure out if they have reasons for existing, and what those reasons might be.

I think I can describe personal style as what rules in writing a person feels are effective and rewarding, and their reasons for when and how they’re applied.

Why did I call it ‘This Problem’s Unsolvable?’

There are two reasons.  One is anecdotal and arbitrary, and might be worth another post sometime.  The other is supposed to represent some bigger idea, and that idea has to do with exploring those rules.